Tag Me Green – Sustainability App

Year – 2018, 2019

Role – Design Consultant, one man army doing User Research, UX, Visual Design, Branding, and Project Management.

Team – 2 founders and me

OVERVIEW

BuzzOnEarth is an eco-startup and a blog about sustainability stories. The problem given to me was-

Design a mobile app to help consumers choose sustainable and healthy products while shopping.

Since the 2 founders I was working with had no product experience before this, I had to do a lot of probing and help them find the answers, define and express their vision starting with who their target audience was, to what functionalities they wanted to provide. I single handedly did user research, UX, visual design and branding along with some project management.

Sustainability being a cause close to my heart, I really enjoyed doing this project and put my heart and soul into it.

PROCESS

RESEARCH

With the above goal in mind, I first did a brainstorming session with the founders to identify the target audience. We came up with:

Millennials (since they are the most environment conscious and tech savvy generation)

Responsible Citizens

New Mothers (very conscious about the products they choose for their baby)

I then interviewed 7 millennials to get an initial feel for how much they know about sustainability and how they made shopping decisions. This helped me frame my questions for the next step – Survey. I designed a survey where I asked people how they determined if a product was sustainable, what prevented them from buying such products and what would make them use an app that would help them shop sustainably. We got good response- 72 users from all over the world.

Insights

Higher price is a major reason that prevents people from buying sustainable products.

Most people identify sustainable products based on eco labels or their own knowledge (which may or may not be accurate). But many people also buy products based on recommendations!

People are willing to use an app provided it has all the information to make a decision and is trustworthy/credible.

This was followed by creation of personas and competitive analysis of the apps currently available in the market.

UX DESIGN

I started by design process by coming up with user needs/stories to be fulfilled. This was followed by quick sketches and wireframes that were iteratively refined based on client feedback.

Challenge

Since there are so many different environmental aspects to consider for a product, it was challenging to represent this information in a way that is easily understood by the user. I came up with the concept of tags, awarded to a product based on reviews by our experts. These tags could be “filled” to the extent the product meets that tag’s criteria. We also did a 2nd survey to validate if these are the issues an environment conscious user easily recognised and modified them accordingly.

“Tags” to help users quickly see a product’s footprint

USER TESTING

After all the main screens were made, I came up with a user test script, made an InVision prototype and tested it with 10 users. I got a lot of useful feedback that led us to:

Add links to online stores where the product can be bought
Add brand rating
Show complementary products
Re-think how to show the user’s “impact” and make it more meaningful – Still working on this
Consider highlighting good and bad products on the scanned shopping receipt – Moved to Phase 2
Re-word tags such as “Water Footprint” to something that users understand
Make the startup tutorial copy more clear

Simple and clean. You’ve made it very easy. Something like this is very much needed! – a user

VISUAL DESIGN & BRANDING

I started off with a moodboard, chose my color palette, fonts and then designed the logo.

Logo’s Evolution

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

I also managed the project by creating a Trello board and keeping track of all the tasks and deadlines.

High Fidelity Designs-